Saturday, October 26, 2024

Musings on Why Political Parties Resemble Secular Religions and Defy Reason

By Rudy Barnes, Jr., October 26, 2024


David Brooks has described why the toss-up between Trump and Hariris defies logic and reason.  It’s because polarized politics now resemble competitive religions, and Brooks refers to partisan operatives as the priesthood.  Politics is not about conflicting issues, as it should be, but about loyalty to conflicting partisan ideals that defy common sense, and are remarkably similar to exclusivist religious doctrines that define faith.

“Each party focuses almost entirely on the faults of the other, with no serious strategy for significantly broadening its electoral reach.” Both parties are content to live with deadlock. Having prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way. Both parties “treat narrow victories like landslides and wave away narrow defeats, seeing both as confirmation of their existing strategies. 

Trump has spent the past nine years not even trying to expand his base but just playing to the same MAGA grievances over and over again. Kamala Harris refuses to break with Biden on any significant issue and is running as a paint-by-numbers orthodox Democrat. Neither party tolerates much ideological diversity. Neither party has a plausible strategy to build a durable majority coalition.” 

Why?  Brooks explains “that political parties no longer serve the function they did in days gone by, when parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Today, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification.  If that’s your purpose, you have to stick to the existing gospel and focus your attention on affirming the current creed of true believers and get so buried within the walls of your own catechism you can’t even imagine what it would be like to think outside it. 

The Democrats have huge advantages in America today. Unlike their opponents, they are not a threat to democracy. Voters trust them on issues like health care and are swinging their way on issues like abortion. They have a great base from which to potentially expand their coalition and build their majority. All they have to do is address their weaknesses where they are out of step with most Americans, as on spending that increases the national debt.

The problem is that where you find their weaknesses, you find the priesthood.  The Democrats are dominated by highly educated progressives who work in academia, the media, and activist groups, and they have a highly developed and self-confident worldview. The problem is that this worldview is rejected by most Americans, and the more the Democratic Party embraces the priesthood’s progressive orthodoxy, the more it loses working-class voters like Hispanics and Blacks.”

The religious priesthood is committed to fighting racism with moral imperatives of faith. Democrats seek new laws for racial preferences in diversity, equity and inclusion. Most Americans seek to fight racism in a different way.  In a recent Pew Research Center survey only a third said they supported race as a factor in college admissions.

Most people support equal opportunity for racial minorities through existing civil rights laws and better race relations rather than with new racial entitlements.  But beware!  “The priesthood has established a doctrine for racial preferences, and woe to those who contradict it.”


Notes:


It’s rare when I find myself thoroughly agreeing with a noted commentator like David Brooks.  That’s why you see so many quotes.  “Harris clearly understands the problem, and has tried to show she is in tune with majority opinions, but in a recent survey of liberals only 45 percent said they were proud to be Americans. Harris is now explicitly running on the theme, country before party; but she cannot turn around the Democratic Party’s entire identity.  All of her gestures have been stylistic.  She hasn’t challenged any substantive Democratic orthodoxy, since candidates no longer define what the party stands for. The priesthood — the people who dominate the national conversation — have that power. Each party has its own metaphysics as a political-cultural-religious-class entity that organizes the social, moral and psychological lives of its believers, and it grows more rigid and impermeable as time goes by. It seems that Harris is running not to be president of the United States but to be president of a theme park called Democratic Magic Mountain, while Trump is running to be president of Republican Fantasy Island. Each party has become too narcissistic to get outside its own head and try to build a coalition with people outside the camp of its true believers.”

The political problem for Harris is that there are a lot more Americans without college degrees than with them, and class is growing more salient in American life, with Hispanic and Black working-class voters shifting steadily over to the GOP. as the working-class party.  The problem for Trump is that he is even better at repelling potential converts than the Democrats. He’d be winning landslides if he had tried to wedge MAGA Republicans into a coalition with Bush-McCain Republicans, but he’s incapable of that.  The problem for the rest of us is that we’re locked into this perpetual state of partisan polarization in which the two parties are deadlocked and nothing ever changes.” Why the Heck Isn’t She Running Away With This? David Brooks, NYTimes, Oct. 17, 2024, at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/opinion/harris-trump-close-race.html


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